Dr Steven Threadgold, Bristol 'Next Generation' Visiting Researcher (University of Newcastle, Australia) Dr Alex Russell (Central Queensland University, Australia)
University and Literary Club, 20 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1HP
This seminar discusses the role that recently developed ‘bet with mates’ features on gambling apps play in the social lives of young men, considering it as an aspect of the broader financialization of young people’s lives. We explore the social role gambling plays in young men’s social lives, especially in relation to sport, masculinity, friendship and the broader affective environments and socialities at play in their gambling practices. More broadly, the literature on young people’s subjectivities has created a well-established and still very relevant understanding of how young people need to make choices in late capitalism, that is, as entrepreneurial subjects that need to make the right choices now as they speculate into their future. As young people find out many of the promises made to them in their journey from child to adult are just not true - that meritocracy exists, that gender and racial inequalities are getting better, that adults will do something about climate change, etc. – there is evidence in some of our research projects that they are feeling let down, ripped off, and sold out. This sees a different orientation towards the future, a more ironic and cynical dispositions, a feeling of ‘whatever’ that leads to choices feeling more as gambling than investing. Both gambling and investing are forms of speculation, but it may be that he privileged can invest, while the rest must gamble.
Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre at University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on youth and class, with particular interests in unequal and alternative work and career trajectories; underground and independent creative scenes; cultural formations of taste, and financial practices and fintech. Steve an Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and on the Editorial Boards of The Sociological Review, DIY, Alternative Culture & Society, and Journal of Applied Youth Studies. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles (Routledge) won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology. His latest edited collection with Jessica Gerrard is Class in Australia. Contact at steven.threadgold@newcastle.edu.au
